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Why cancer research should focus on humans

Dr Azra Raza, Professor of Medicine at Columbia University in New York, and Science Adviser to Safer Medicines Trust, gives a fascinating one-hour interview on the human imperative in cancer research in this highly informative podcast. In 2015, Professor Raza gave a powerful and moving 13-minute TEDx Talk on the same theme, which you can view on YouTube.

The UK must humanise drug discovery

A report was published in January by the Medicines Discovery Catapult and the BioIndustry Association, entitled: State of the Discovery Nation 2018. Based on surveys and in-depth interviews with more than 100 senior executives of drug discovery companies, the report offers a blueprint for successful pharmaceutical research, where patients and human data are placed at the heart of drug discovery. The current research process depends on animal models of disease and toxicology that are “poor approximations of humans”; consequently 40 per cent of new drugs fail when first tried in real patients. The rate at which new drugs are launched per $1bn spent on pharma R&D is one-30th of the level 40 years ago but “humanising” the early stages of research would ease the “productivity crisis” in pharmaceutical research.

“Discovery must start with biological targets derived from patient data and samples, which create candidate drugs that are highly selective for proven human disease targets in well-defined patent subgroups, not animal models,” said Chris Molloy, chief executive of the Medicines Discovery Catapult, quoted in the Financial Times.